Scratchi: the Real Origin of the Name

Revised September 16, 1997

Who Was Scratchi?

Back in the 1940's, a ham radio magazine called CQ had
a wacky monthly column, supposedly by a person named
Hashafisti Scratchi. He had some pretty funny adventures
in ham radio, always one step beyond the outer limits
of the twilight zone. Even today the columns are still great
fun to read, if you can still find any old copies from the
1940's and 1950's.

Who Wrote Scratchi?

It was a mystery as to who created the character over 50 years ago
for
CQ,
whose editor at the time was
Mr. Wayne Green,
now W2NSD/1 and publisher of
73 Magazine.

Wayne kept the author's identity secret for many years.
He certainly had a lot of people guessing and second-guessing,
especially in Phoenix Arizona,
where the original Scratchi had his many
adventures from the 1940's through the late 1960's...
possibly beyond.

I met Wayne in person at an ARRL convention (San Diego, 1986)
and asked him. He got a big grin but wouldn't tell me!

Now it can be told! I met Wayne again at the
1995 ARRL Southwestern Division Convention, which was held in
September 1995 in Long Beach CA. And I asked him again.
This time he told me the story, and here it is:

The "Hashafisti Scratchi" character was created by George Floyd,
W2RYT, prior to WW2, and appeared in "GE Radio News."
After the war, the columns began appearing in CQ Magazine.
Due to an emergence of what is now called "political
correctness", they eventually ended sometime in the late
1960's or so.

How come I've been sometimes found using this handle?

The whole gory story follows. Read on.

Shortly after I upgraded to a Technician-class license
in the mid 1980's, I decided to try to get onto HF. I didn't
get any HF gear until sometime around 1987. About this time,
the new Novice and Technician HF privileges came to be,
and so I decided to try putting up an antenna.

I bought a simple 1-trap sloper antenna for 2 bands,
then added a bunch of additional wires to it, fanning out,
sort of a half of a fanned multiband dipole.
The idea was to make it work from 40 meters all the
way through 10 meters.

About this time I decided I needed to get something to
help me accurately tune and adjust that thing, and so
I spent some money on a Palomar Engineers' RX Noise Bridge.
That dandy little thing is the greatest little tool
you can have when tinkering with HF antennas.

Earlier on the same day I bought the noise bridge,
there was an area ham radio swap meet. I was there that
morning and found a huge stack of old CQ, 73, and QST
magazines. These were all from the late 1940's, a lot
during the 1950's, and a good number from the 1960's,
and they all were that nice, small size magazine that
they don't make anymore. At ten cents each, I carted
off as many different ones as I could find.

Over at my house later that day, I was getting out the
brand new noise bridge, reading the instructions,
and trying it out. My brother and another ham friend were
there, and taking turns reading these old SCRATCHI
columns out loud from CQ Magazine. I should add that this
wasn't easy, because they were in very bad, misspelled English,
which was part of the humor.

In one of Scratchi's (mis)-adventures, he needed to whip up an
antenna tuner, so that's what he did. He just slapped one
together using whatever parts he found first. The strange
thing was, that tuner worked incredibly well, pulling in
signals from an otherwise dead band (80 meters at high noon),
as well as allowing transmissions to get out to the world
just as well! And this was with a QRP transmitter! Well, then,
imagine how well it might work with a full kilowatt
running through it... KA-BOOM! And of course, Scratchi
couldn't concoct a tuner ever again that worked so
well!

So here we all were, laughing hysterically at Scratchi's
antics, issue after issue, reliving in hours what took
old timers decades to enjoy issue by issue.

And there I was with that noise bridge. I finally got that antenna
tuned perfectly with it, working in conjunction with an MFJ
antenna tuner. So I decided to key up on low power to see
what that SWR meter had to say.

I can still recall the warning on the instructions for the
noise bridge. Something about: Never transmit through it.

I keyed up. A little wift of smoke came from the noise bridge.
Yes, that noise bridge did its job, and tuned up ONE antenna
system in its amazingly short life.

The others in the room looked on...
and they've saddled me with the nickname Scratchi ever since!